As someone who works with apps daily, researching, reading, testing and writing about them, I sometimes lose sight of what’s important: apps are personal, customizable, and adaptable. Your choice of apps on your device, the different settings you pick to personalize them, and how and when you use them remains a very individually-oriented experience.

Then I remember Todoist, and how I took a seemingly simple task management app and transformed it into the most efficient inventory and order system for my pharmacy. The adaptation to my needs is so complete that I forget, almost all the time, that this was a task app to begin with. Below is my story with Todoist, told as a reminder that when you take a powerful app and use your imagination a little, you can make it work any way you want it to.

For the longest time, I have been annoyed by the state of my contacts on Android. Between college and family, France and Lebanon, my Android.Appstorm contacts and my pharmacy suppliers and customers, I had over 800 contacts that were almost impossible to manage. Then I decided to set aside a few hours one day and go through them all on Google Contacts, managing duplicates and groups, deleting contact details that I didn’t need anymore, and so on.

Now that my contact list is as pristine as possible, I still find myself with the odd duplicate every now and then. Merging these duplicates should be a straightforward process on my phone but unfortunately, most contact apps on Android — whether the default Android People app or the alternatives made by Samsung or LG or HTC — don’t offer a simple duplicate searching and merging option. Enter Merge+, the easiest and fastest way to merge duplicates on Android. Here’s how to use it.

Recently Google released its new note-taking solution, Google Keep. The competition in this area is pretty stiff with a lot really great apps that already exist — just off the top of my head, there’s Evernote, Simple Notes, Fetch, and OneNote. With these and more already in the note-taking app space, how does Google Keep measure up? After using it for several weeks in real-world scenarios, here’s what I found out.

When the Nexus 7 was released, everyone highlighted all of its superior qualities but there was one negative which seemed to spring up everywhere – the lack of external storage. With only one input for micro-USB and no SD card slot, we were limited to whatever size we decided to buy. Personally, I went with the now-discontinued 8GB model, so I have about 6GB to fit everything I want — roughly three films could stop me from downloading anything else. But even the 16GB version can filled quite quickly.

So, as the Android community normally does, they found a way to bypass this problem. This fix comes in the form of Nexus Media Importer, an app that allows you to easily transfer or play files from an external storage device. Read on to find out how useful it can be.

It’s National Novel Writing Month once again, time to challenge yourself to write 50000 words in 30 days, no easy feat! But with your Android device by your side, you can keep working on your novel or non-fiction book anywhere and anytime. Throughout this week, we’ll share our best apps, thoughts, and tips to help you achieve that writing goal.

When you think about it, your Android is actually the perfect writing device. It’s small, portable, lightweight and fast – and when paired with Simplenote, it becomes that bit more amazing!

As a writer, I like to get in some words whenever I have free time during the day. Unfortunately, I can’t bring my laptop or tablet with me everywhere I go – but I can bring my phone. So when I began looking into ways to be keep my writing seamless between my three devices, Simplenote stood out above all others. Read on to find out how you too can have a seamless writing experience via Simplenote.

It’s National Novel Writing Month once again, time to challenge yourself to write 50000 words in 30 days, no easy feat! But with your Android device by your side, you can keep working on your novel or non-fiction book anywhere and anytime. Throughout this week, we’ll share our best apps, thoughts, and tips to help you achieve that writing goal.When I decided to start writing, my first step was to find an app that would help me keep track of my goals. There are many Android apps to manage goals and many writing apps as well; I could have used any one of them, but I wanted something more.

I usually use Google Drive for outlines and to do lists for general tasks. What I was looking for was a hybrid of both; an app that would allow me to treat an outline like a todo list, and where I could check-off sections as I wrote them. Unfortunately there was not one app that I felt did this well, so I came up with what I consider a winning combination of apps to help me stay on track: Google Drive, Tasks, and Regularly.

Let me start by asking a simple question: currently, what is the quickest way to switch between apps on Android?

If you have already opened the app, then simply pressing and holding the home button on your phone will show you it on a list of recent apps. (If your phone came with ICS, it may even have a dedicated button just for this.) But every time you restart your phone, the recent apps list is emptied – and sometimes, of course, you’ll want to switch to an app that you haven’t opened recently. In either case, you’ll have to open up the app drawer and scroll through the multitude of apps residing in there to find the one you want.

SwipePad: Hyperspace Jump is a much better solution. It allows you to “launch anything from within any app”, as the developers, Calcium Ion, put it. But don’t be fooled; this app’s functionality exceeds just switching between applications…(more…)

Even blogging, an intensive activity originally done in the comfort of a workstation, has gone mobile. With the rise of smart phones and tablets, it’s easy to take our digital life with us wherever we go.

In this article, you’ll learn about some useful apps to maintain your blog using a mobile device (either phone or tablet). Why do I recommend them? Well, because this article was written using only my phone – with the help of these apps.

The Pomodoro Technique is a popular time-boxing productivity method to help you improve your focus and concentration, requiring nothing more than a kitchen timer. The idea is simple: alternate 25 minutes of work with 5 minutes of rest, and repeat.

Today I’ll show you the principles of this technique, and how to use it daily, using Pomodroido, an app designed to help you do the technique whenever you go, so you don’t need to carry a timer with you everywhere.

The life of a student can be very chaotic at times. Luckily, there are some excellent apps that are perfect for keeping track of your daily life. While each app has its own benefit individually, they’re even more powerful when used in combination with each other to achieve seamless organization of events, assignments, notes, and anything else you would like to keep track of.

To do this, I recommend centralizing your organization around a feature-packed note-taking application. In this demonstration, I will be using Springpad.(more…)